


Baby Blue

by inspiredbythemusic



Series: WayV Drabbles [1]
Category: K-pop, NCT (Band), WAYV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:28:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23483839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inspiredbythemusic/pseuds/inspiredbythemusic
Summary: This drabble was very much inspired by George Strait's "Baby Blue"
Relationships: Qian Kun/Reader, Qian Kun/You
Series: WayV Drabbles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1694812
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	Baby Blue

**Author's Note:**

> This drabble was very much inspired by George Strait's "Baby Blue"

_"She always held it deep inside, but somehow I always knew she'd go away when the grass turned green and the sky turned baby blue."_

Kun was not supposed to fall in love with you. 

It happened all at once a few winters ago, when your family started to rent the house next door as a holiday getaway. After spending all morning shoveling the driveway, he was sent by his parents to invite your family to the New Year’s Eve party that doubled as his birthday celebration. Because it was so late notice— the party was to start at sundown that evening— the invitation was a mere courtesy, a way to welcome you to the neighborhood. 

Kun didn’t expect you to answer the door with a bright smile, eagerly accepting the invitation. “I won’t have time to get you a gift,” you acknowledged while stealing a glance at your watch, “but I’ll make it up to you somehow.” 

By no means did Kun consider himself shy, but he wasn’t one to flirt just after saying hello. He surprised himself by suggesting, “Maybe you could dance with me tonight.” 

While he burned with embarrassment at his forwardness and shifted his gaze away from you, you laughed an airy sort of laugh that belonged in the Springtime— not in those Winter Mountains. 

“Okay— you said your name is Kun, right?” Leaning against his shovel, he nodded, and you promised, “I’ll dance with you at your party, Kun.”

If Kun had to pinpoint the moment he fell in love, it wouldn’t be that first conversation that perhaps lit the smallest spark, even though it sent him walking from your door to his wearing a toothy grin that warranted curiosity from his parents. The moment— if there is only one— must have fallen somewhere around when he found you at the party requesting that the DJ play your favorite song. Your smile was polite yet sincere, and it grew wildly when you spotted Kun admiring you, as you dashed toward him. 

As you looked up at him, your hair bangs fell back out of your face. “You didn’t forget my promise, did you?”

Kun shook his head. “How could I?” He bit down on his tongue before he could reveal that he had been looking forward to dancing with you all day— that he had been hoping to dance to a song just like the one you requested. 

His face turned a blistering pink as you grabbed his hands and placed him around your waist, atop the silky fabric of your baby blue dress that didn’t quite match the party’s silver and midnight blue theme that decided his suit should be an almost-black blue. 

“I’m not usually like this,” you mumbled as your hands met behind his neck, as if you owed him some kind of apology. “So forward, I mean. I’m usually . . . different.”

There was nothing wrong with being forward, Kun thought, but he nodded as if to accept your sort-of apology. “Maybe that’s part of the fun of being so far from home,” he thought out loud while swaying you in time with the music. “You get to be yourself— like, whoever you’re too afraid to be around people who know the other you.” 

His forehead wrinkled, and just as he started to apologize for making no sense, you smiled. He forgot what he was going to say. 

While those words emboldened you to be the brightest burst of color in his life, Kun knew they couldn’t quite apply to him. He always lived in that house in the mountains, and he still would after your family packed up and left. Had he been thinking clearly about the end, that knowledge that he couldn’t follow you would have kept him from allowing you to become the sun in that snowy landscape. Had he been thinking, he would have guarded his heart. You could have had your fun— staying up all night drinking hot chocolate, and making snowmen and snow angels, and having those all-day skiing lessons that included a lot more falling and laughing than actual skiing— but in a way that didn’t shape his identity. In a way that didn’t somehow change him until he couldn’t remember who he had been before he spent his hours with you. 

But Kun didn’t think. 

He didn’t realize how much of his heart you held until you carried it all the way back to your home (who knows how many) miles away. He didn’t realize how much he had come to admire your smiles and laughter until they didn’t accent his every day. He didn’t realize how many details of the day he saved for your conversations until, gradually, they stopped as you each became too busy with your individual lives to schedule calls or respond to texts. 

He didn’t even realize how much he missed you until you appeared on his front porch on a winter morning to knock on his door and ask, face all rosy from the crisp, biting mountain air, “Are you having a party this year?” You must have run to his door straight out of your parents’ car— you were shivering, wearing a floral jacket that wasn’t nearly thick enough, hair tied up in a tropical braid. 

Kun blinked at you, thinking only that this was how you really looked: sun-kissed and floral and warm and beautiful. He couldn’t speak. He only nodded. 

You took advantage of the silence. “Can I dance with you again?”

He told himself not to imagine that you had also been dreaming about that dance all Spring, all Summer, all Autumn. This time was different from last time. Now that you stood before him, all he could see was the impending good-bye. All he knew was that the moments were already fleeting, and there wouldn’t be enough time, and there was no way to chase the seconds that had already passed. Not trusting himself to speak even if he could find his voice, he nodded again. 

And so the cycle repeated for the next few winters, with Kun choking back his feelings because he knew you would leave once the snow stopped falling, because (if you loved him too) he didn’t want a long-distance relationship to limit your opportunities back home, because he thought you didn’t want your Winter life to seep into your Spring, Summer, and Autumn life. There were moments when his admiration was too overwhelming to conceal, so he would grab your hand when he taught you how to ice skate even though you didn’t need the support, he would hold you closer during his birthday dance, or he would drop a few tears during your goodbye before you had closed yourself into your parents’ car.

Generally, though, Kun had grown to be more appreciative of your time together because it was limited. He was as comfortable as he could have been with the lack of change until your sunny voice broke through the late-night winter chill to say, “I have to tell you something.”

Since you yanked him out of the party and onto the back balcony just after your dance, Kun assumed that your news was urgent. Good news is never urgent. “Okay,” he frowned and set his nervous energy toward tracing into the snow on the railing. “What’s wrong?”

He looked up to catch you glancing down at your silver wristwatch. “I have to get your reaction to this quickly. The clock strikes midnight in, like, two minutes.” 

“What happens at midnight?” Kun tilted his head quizzically, forgetting in his panic that the global new year and his birthday started at the bell’s toll. Even as he facepalmed at his stupidity, heart fluttering at the sparkle of your smile, he didn’t understand why the conversation had to end before the start of the new year. He was too flustered to ask. 

“Hey, stop that!” You pried your hands from his face. “I need to see your face when I tell you that I’ve been accepted to the university just a few miles away.”

“You— what?” His forehead wrinkled. As he tried to understand— you never talked about the future— his heart leaped to conclusions. “The university? You mean— the one I’m going to?” He pointed, “The one just seventeen miles east?”

As if you could see the school from where you stood, your gaze followed his gesture. “I mean, I’m not so sure about the direction, but—”

Kun didn’t mean to interrupt; he was too excited to control himself despite his efforts to suppress his hopes. “You’re not going back to your hometown?”

“No, I am.” You frowned to mirror his disappointment at your response, quick to explain, “I have to— at least until I graduate. I’ll be back in the Summer. Mom and Dad finally bought the house next door after I’ve been begging them for _years—_ ” 

Kun gasped and turned from the railing to fully face you. It was incomprehensible. Too good to be true. “So you’re going to be living here? With me?”

It wasn’t quite accurate, but you nodded enthusiastically anyway. You matched the excitement bubbling in his stomach by beaming, “Yeah! And maybe— maybe now—”

You were interrupted by booming cheers from the party and erupting fireworks overhead. You didn’t have to look down at your watch to know that midnight had arrived. 

Emboldened by some invisible force just as he had been at your first meeting, Kun stepped closer. Catching you around the waist and, tracing his fingers along the baby blue fabric of your dress, he hummed, “Maybe now?” His head tilted to the side, and his lips pouted as he looked for you to finish your sentence. 

“Maybe now—” you reddened under Kun’s stare. You squirmed under his touch so intensely that he would have considered you uncomfortable were it not for your blossoming smile— “we can be together.”

Although Kun had learned to become good at goodbye, now that he had what seemed like an invitation to kiss you, to call you his for more than just a Winter, he didn’t let the opportunity pass unseized or unappreciated. 


End file.
